"Ecco il suo scontrino". The other people in the dining car, which just
passed over the Brenner pass into Italy, did not quite understand why I laughed
out loud when I heard this. I had not been to Italy for over a year, and the
words sent a shudder of nostalgia through me. My bliss was complete when the
cashier was unable to give me change for 50,000 Lire - I was back home! Only the
anti-semitic asides in Woody Allen movies can illustrate my relationship with
Italy, where you have to keep your receipt within 200 meters of the point of
sale, and where cashiers start their shift without 25 USD worth of change.
On the way back to my seat, I had another uplifting
experience. I sighted an echte Südtiroler Gitsch (1),
reminding me of a happy Haflinger
filly, with a mane of flaxen hair resisting any futile attempts of coiffurage,
and with hips slightly oversized so as to be proportionally wider than the
jawbone, whose biblical dimensions visibly underlined the concept of a woman's
most dangerous weapon. The rash of fury provoked by her cellphone's fancy
ringing tone subsided the moment she started speaking, obviously to an Italian
friend of hers. The Italian was fluent enough, the grammar perfect to the point
of not being noticeable. Yet the melody, originally formed along the ragged
Rosengarten skyline, was forcibly bent to assimilate the soft lines of the
Ligurian shores. Tender Italian vowels cautiously felt their way through a
throat that had clearly been designed with a different language in mind, while
the "r"s would have had you immediately arrested on any American airport as a
suspect Arab terrorist. "Allorkha dschi fediamo all'arkhifo
del rrkheno"! (2)

Another gitsch, another laugh: the girl in my compartment was reading a book
on Italian art history. Which would have been innocent enough, had it not had
Tut-Enk-Amun's mask on the cover. The subtitle enlightened me about this choice
of illustration, denouncing my weird logic as utterly un-Italian box-thinking.
Egypt and Greece were declared merely the foundations for the treasure of the
great Italian culture, which in turn is being imitated by whatever came after
it!

In Bolzano, I shoved
my sister-in-law and her baby daughter out of the train, although there was
nobody there to pick them up, even though we had telephoned a few days earlier
to announce our arrival on this specific train at this precise hour. Not as she
had done on flying up from Senegal, telling us she'd arrive on Tuesday at 7.30
am, when indeed she meant to leave Tuesday night to arrive on Wednesday morning,
which we didn't immediately notice, though, because the connecting Sabena flight
from Brussels was cancelled due to that carrier's insolvency, and when we did
realize this, it was no good either, because the next day Dakar airport was
closed to the general public as a security precaution linked to a meeting of
African chiefs of state convened by our deeply venerated president, Maitre
Abdoulaye Wade (refer also to a previous part of
this saga). As a result of this whole mess, the contents of the styrofoam
box that Aminata had brought along were accurately described by the customs
officer at Stuttgart airport as fish soup – fresh fish and crushed ice only ever
remain cold for so long. Luckily, the official was so amused by the contents of
Amina’s 200 pound baggage that he even forgot to confiscate this undocumented
biohazard.

I travelled on to Verona, where I
first called Mariétou from a public phone and told her to call Fallou in Bolzano
and tell him Amina and Ndeye Penda were sitting in the railway station. In order
to do this, I had to buy a phone card, thus confessing that I was the last human in Italy without a cellphone. To my relieve,
Aminata had been dutyfully picked up, so I could enjoy my tour of select Verona
bookshops and wine-bars with a quiet conscience.

At 7.30 pm, I finally arrived (again) in Bolzano, where Franz felt a bit
mocked when I came from the wrong direction. 30 minutes of hair-raising bends
later, we got to the Mock’s home on the Ritten, where Edelgard was waiting with the
dinner. Their son Bernie was there, too, and during dinner we tried to work out
ways to install an artificial climbing wall at our new house. The grips wouldn’t
pose any problem, there are – admittedly expensive – techniques for fixing them
on just about any wall. The security hooks are the real challenge. They must
support 3,000 kilos to be considered safe. In the end I realized that I could
buy several life-time memberships at professional sites for the 10,000 Euros
such an installation would cost me.

The following day, I had a chance to think over my freeclimbing aspirations
anyhow. The via ferrata Gerardo Sega begins harmless enough, with a 10 meter
steel ladder leading halfway up a vertical wall. At the top of the ladder, you
turn left and traverse the whole width of the cliff on a ledge about 20 cm wide,
with a steel cable to cling on to as you edge out over the point where the
access path ends and the cliff below you drops about 50 more meters. The rest of
the way is sheer pleasure. The fascination of climbing in Trentino owes much to
the fact that you get all the action of rock-climbing, but below the tree-line.
You can enjoy the breath-taking view of mountainsides burning with the colours
of indian summer, and challenging rock-climbing bits interlude with pleasant
walks on forest paths, with the warm autumn light filtering through the
multi-coloured foliage.

During dinner that night, while reminiscing about old times, we were bound to
remember our friend Toni (the cheerful guy in the middle of the photo
at the top), who had died in a horrible way the winter before. Hit by an
avalanche, one of his skiing poles got thrust through his abdomen. He was still
alive when they dug him out half an hour later, but died soon after in the
Trento hospital. The heart-lung-machines at Innsbruck were both occupied, the
one in Bolzano was free, but with no one around who knew to work it, so they had
to fly him all the way to Trento, to no avail. Toni wouldn’t have liked to see
us sulking; after quenching a quiet tear, we remembered his natural gift for
telling revolting stories, all true, from his life, himself humbly smiling while
the rest of us were roaring with laughter, with the exception of the professor
(a guy who thinks that having read a ton of books entitles him to be a theatre
critic), who remained in shocked silence as Toni remembered the good old times
of the brothel in Meran, 50 Lire for the common folk on the ground floor, 100
Lire for better gentlemen on the first floor. On the more tragic side, he had
been cheated out of two years of his life by his first employer, who had never
cared to register the young boy with social security, a fact that Toni found out
when applying for old age pension. There he was told he had to continue for two
more years to be eligible at all. The only non-academic in our little group, he
happily enjoyed our after-mountaineering discussions at Schwarzsiehler or
similar traditional institutions of Südtiroler Buschn-Kultur
(3).
When the bank manager , the
controller , the accountant and the
surgeon had drunk themselves warm and were heatedly discussing the
utilitarian advantages of monotheistic religion in a pagan environment, Toni,
who never touched alcohol, would enjoy the show from the wings, while the
professor was again reduced to dumbfounded suffering at this display of drunken
silliness.

Later that evening, Franz untypically announced a phone-call he was about to
make. Franz is not the loquacious kind. When he calls someone on the phone, he
doesn’t make a fuss about it. But there was something he felt he had to mentally
prepare me for. "I’m calling Carlo", he mumbled, adding somewhat embarrassed:
“There is now an Italian going with us on the mountains”. I met Carlo the next
morning at the Colle parking lot. Although Italian, he blended in near-perfectly
with the other guys, insofar as he spoke not three words all day long, if you
count out the occasional “ma che böööllo!” (7),
which he duely echoed to the Tyrolian “na schiiiian!” (8),
which one is supposed to utter when, turning a corner of rock, one is struck by
an awe-inspiring view, and which, if the beauty of it all becomes unbearable,
can become an ecstatic “na schaug wia schiiian!” (11)
(followed by “che böööllo – ma veramente!”) (12).
To counterbalance such emotional overflow, the true Tiroler follows these
outbreaks with mantra-like enumerations of all the mountains in sight,
indiscernible to the Flachland-Tiroler – I usually lose count after the third or
forth name. "Zemm sigsch wunderbar an Adamello, Greizschbizz, der midn schian
Ferner is da Dschewedale, danemm Orddler und Königschbizz, und hindn der schiane
is de Weißkugel" (13)
– they more or less look the same to me, and explanations along the line: “the
one with the nice triangular peak” are of little help.

That evening, I had to do my shopping. Equipped with Franz’s Metro (14)
card, I bought 30 kilos of Barilla pasta,
15 packs of Lavazza espresso, 5
kilos Keschtn (15),
20 packs of Schüttelbrot and the occasional titbits. Just to show the Senegalese
that I can do power-shopping, too!

November 2001 Günter Eckert

(1) Gitsch (South-Tyrolian dialect): expression indicating a
young girl (at least several months younger than the person using the
expression, if the latter is male. Seldom used for women over 30). [back]

(2) Allora ci vediamo all'arrivo del treno (Italian): See you
at the station when the train arrives. [back]

(3) Buschn: Tyrolian institution, by which farmers are
allowed, for a limited period, to operate a restaurant on their premises,
marketing mainly their own produce, which usually consists of red wine, white
wine, Würstl mit Kraut, wine (red or white), Ziager (4),
Portugieser (5),
Graukas (6),
many other mouth-watering specialities and, of course, wine. [back]

(4) Ziager: strong cheese, not from goatmilk, as the name
(Ziege = goat) may suggest, but one that has matured (gezogen = drawn). Usually
served with slices of raw onion, oil, vinegar and salt. [back]

(10) Hochdeutsch (German): Artificial language which has
never been spoken by anyone. Closest analogy: English as spoken by Eliza
Doolittle, without any discernible local or social influence. On second thought,
maybe German as tought at the Goethe-Institut Budapest (Hungary). [back]

(13) Accidental enumeration of mountain names I have heard
somewhere. There is no point in the Alps, Dolomites or Kaukasus from where one
could see them all. Given my ignorance in these matters, perhaps there is... [back]

(14) Metro: Chain of supermarkets which is supposed to cater
exclusively to retailers, a condition which is controlled by means of an ID
card. Has led to a class distinction wherever the chain operates: Privileged
individuals have somehow succeeded in obtaining a bona fide Metro card. Members
of the underpriviledged minority have to borrow one from an individual in the
first category, or from their employer. An urban legend reports that once every
full moon, an actual retailer is seen entering the premises (probably to deliver
something they have bought elsewhere). [back]

(15) Keschtn (Tyrolean; Schriftdeutsch: Maroni): Edible
chestnuts. Roasted, a delicacy, (nearly never served with onions). Since they
are rather dry, it can take astounding quantities of red wine to slosh them down
(which maybe accounts for their popularity?). [back]